Car-free plaza ready for strolling

Chairs, tables in coming weeks at Balboa Park's central square

Balboa Park's Plaza de Panama has a new surface -- and no cars -- in a pedestrian-only experiment completed this week. A city photographer captured this aerial view from a police helicopter.
— - City of San Diego

Balboa Park's Plaza de Panama has a new surface -- and no cars -- in a pedestrian-only experiment completed this week. A city photographer captured this aerial view from a police helicopter.
/ - City of San Diego

The overhead photo snapped from a police helicopter looks like an architect's model.

But the cream-colored surface in Balboa Park's central Plaza de Panama -- free of cars, parking spaces, traffic cones and signs -- is the real thing, thanks to an instant makeover ordered earlier this month by Mayor Bob Filner.

The idea, a dream for decades, was to turn the 1.5-acre square into a pedestrian-only place. Numerous plans had called for this makeover, most recently a $45 million grander vision by Qualcomm co-founder Irwin Jacobs.

But when a court vetoed the Jacobs plan and Filner was elected, a simpler, $300,000 scheme was cobbled together and the first phase was completed this week.

City spokesman Bill Harris said the last action was painting cross walks across a new traffic loop linking El Prado to Pan American Road.

"In the next few weeks we're going to watch and see how the public uses the space," he said.

Balboa Park's Plaza de Panama before the renovations, in a view from Google Maps.
Google

Yes
75% (941)

No
25% (310)

1251 total votes.

For now, no vendors, food carts or entertainers will receive permits to operate in the plaza, Harris said.

Instead the public will be free to bring their own tables and chairs, skateboards, strollers and bikes and their own two feet (and a dog or two) to wander freely about the plaza. They'll likely fight -- nicely? -- for seats around the tiled fountain, donated for that people-watching purpose in the mid-1990s by the late Mary Elizabeth North.

"We'll be watching to see how people transect and bisect across the plaza," Harris said.

That activity will help determine where to place new city-purchased umbrella tables, chairs, benches and tree planter boxes.

"It is a pedestrian space, one we want the people of San Diego to define," he said.

No organized events, including any over the Fourth of July weekend, are planned, he said.

"It's a temporary configuration and that means it won't be static," he said. "We will attempt different things in the configuration, based on what we're seeing."

So far, Harris acknowledged that some people have complained that they can't park in the plaza any longer -- there were more than 60 spaces before the changeover -- and some handicapped persons have said they have to walk farther to get to the San Diego Museum of Art and other institutions around the plaza.

"We heard a lot of concern about all the spaces being removed," Harris said. "How many were for disabled? Not many. If you were lucky or early enough to get one of those spots, God bless you."

More handicapped spaces have been designated at the Spreckels Organ Pavilion lot, he said, and the park tram can transport visitors to a new stop immediately south of the statue of El Cid in the plaza.

"It's a little farther away but it's not really that farther away," he said.

One other change was to relocate valet service from the entrance to the House of Hospitality on the plaza to the sidewalk just north of the Spreckels Organ Pavilion. Filner had originally wanted the service located to a lot behind the House of Hospitality. Harris said the new dropoff has worked out well and funneled visitors to the arcade along the west side of the House of Hospitality, location of the Prado restaurant.

Watch these two videos, shot by UTTV videographer Christian Rodas at the Plaza de Panama on Thursday, June 27.